Burnished Throne
by Gray Glube
Summary: They say there's pride, that there's supposed to be, and that it necessitates the fall to come. Zoe centric, but included in various pairings.


**Author:** grayglube

**Title:** Burnished Throne

**Summary:** They say there's pride, that there's supposed to be, and that it necessitates the fall to come. Zoe centric with various smut.

**Rating:** M

**Warnings:** Language, sexual situations, Zoe/Kyle, Zoe/Madison, Zoe/Demon

**A/N:** Zoe centric, with smut, no real _romantic _pairing. There's an excerpt from the Decameron in here, I've cut it down to the important bit, for those of you don't know the Decameron is a book where 10 people tells ten tales and day for ten days in a mansion in the country while the Plague is all the rage in more the denser populated parts of Italy. Also there's some 'occult' references nothing too wordy or complicated, The Lesser Key of Solomon is detail of the 72 demons Solomon is said to have captured and in interviewed in order to detail their powers and abilities and their associated ranks throughout Hell.

* * *

It's all of them that have led to this.

It never would have happened otherwise.

Madison has a short fuse, potential but there's too much there that's too familiar to who's going to be a dead supreme soon enough.

Nan doesn't want it.

Queenie is scared.

Fiona's days are numbered.

Cordelia wasn't raised properly.

Zoe knows, she gets it. She reacts when necessary and when something is wrong she knows and she set out to make it right.

Madison could be her second, there's steel there, but something breaks that night when they go out. Looking for trouble and trying to forget, respectively.

Maybe the break would have helped but she didn't act quickly enough, or do enough. It was never really her place, Madison comes to her and Zoe gets to keep her own secrets she might have otherwise had to spill to leash Madison to her.

She's islanded at the academy, they wanted her and they've got her and their going to teach her or she'll just have to teach herself.

Cordelia would want her to ask permission and Fiona is struck blind by obsession.

And all she wants is to live.

She'll let Madison feel indebted to her, for a while, until the generosity turns into something rotten and awful. Nothing comes for free and even if what she's got is more trouble than it might be worth anything else Madison might give her is not without cost.

She wonders if she's just afraid like Fiona is or like the crazed Madame was or if she's just vengeful like Laveau, she's both but she's not blinded and she's not going to be stupid.

There's balance. Laveau had it and lost is because of the Madame and the Madame got it only through centuries of introspection precluded by bloodshaded insanity, Fiona never had it and Cordelia doesn't have the backbone.

It's the only thing she wants.

Control.

She doesn't need time and she doesn't need fame, not retribution, not an explanation or someone else's pain, or normalcy.

Control, just that.

Over herself, because it feels like she's losing it in response to what everyone else does and that's just as bad as being a slave or a student who is just a pawn or ignorant to exactly what she can do.

She doesn't want someone to rule her and she doesn't want to be a stepping stone and she doesn't want to be kept in the dark.

When she thinks about it after everyone has sequestered themselves away into boxes they call rooms, prison cells of safety from the outside world and parents that have forsaken them and careers that don't tolerate tardiness and sass and real on-set death, she confuses the line between control and power.

It's hard to tell if one is just the action of another, form and function whether their inherently the same or if they are different and just cleaved together roughly for the sake of survival.

* * *

She's leaves the past behind a little while after she steps inside the school gates, unfortunately he's inside those limits too and he's still stuck with her, Kyle.

Every witch has to have a familiar and she's started to think of him as a cat or a toad or a rat, they can't talk either, if he could he'd probably say 'kill me' anyway.

He can never be a real boy. It's sad.

It only makes her realize that she's not made to be with boys.

Or men.

She's been reading. The school, like any other school, is not devoid of a library.

Nobodies reads anymore.

They expect to be taught, skulls cracked opened and knowledge poured in, but it's work, it's nights of no sleep and not eating until the page is finished and doing what is expected regardless of want.

Cordelia has not paid attention to the inventory of tomes on dusty shelves, and Fiona has never wanted to pay a real price for what she wants.

As she reads, she learns it's not about paying a price. It's about obligation.

Tribute, promise, choice, exchange, repayment.

It feels like she's known it for a long time. Eventually she realizes she had. Time moves fast, she'll think it's the month previous until a current holiday comes around and she apprehends slowly why she walks to the same spot first among the shelves in the library. Something should be there and it never is. It's somewhere else.

Fiona or Cordelia has found the book, brought it to a new place on a different shelf at least three times now but it doesn't matter, she doesn't need to read it again. Whatever it is that whoever has been trying to get her to forget is coming back.

Something inside of her is growing and her control is catching up.

It's not just simple candle flare-ups and displacing chimney dust, or turning a frog into a prince with a kiss, or killing Charlie and the disgusting fraternity rapist. It isn't just having her mind come around after someone tried to make the things in it go away.

When Fiona uses the cultivated version of what's still raw in her it doesn't last. Zoe doesn't know how she knows that. She can guess, though. Fiona wants her youth back but she's only old because that's the price she has to pay, the thing she has to suffer with until she dies.

Zoe doesn't believe everything she reads but there's a reason they don't want her reading it to begin with.

It's because if what the books tell you is true than everyone has been doing it wrong, they've been cheating.

Everyone's got demons.

And demons have humans.

And the devil has his due.

That's the mistake people make, everyone is a slave, dark days are coming and all that, so she's hedging her bets. Their numbers are thin and no one is trustworthy, she isn't going to isolate herself and wait for a knife in the back.

Whatever comes around already owns her. She's thought that maybe she's never had a choice. Something's been waiting for her to figure it out, it's flattering that they gave her enough credit to think her smart enough.

She is, smart.

But she's scared.

And she'll do it anyway.

Something owns her, that's why it kills the boys she'll love, that's why she can offer up the ones she doesn't on a bloody altar of hospital bed sheets bleached white to hide the stains of shit and piss and someone else's blood.

She's a supplicant to a private god, more than that she's an acolyte to some dead dread rite that everyone else has forgotten about or turned into dancing with the devil around a bonfire naked or into an ironic totem of female empowerment having to do with the moon or menstruation.

What she's done isn't nice or sweet or some wonderful gift.

Madison uses without discrimination, Nan feels some sort of obligation to humanity when she tells people what's in store or what's coming for them, Fiona wants to feel alive.

There are other witches. 'Gone bad'.

Misty, who only wanted to help.

And there are more.

Council members who seem like they should have ominous titles, shadow brokers who keep everyone in line with displays of force.

There are witches who can slow things down and have their immortality through equally slow mental decay.

There are ones who can go unseen.

There are ones who are like viruses, ageless only because they are copies.

Zoe wonders if Myrtle knows what she's going to do.

Here now, after finding out is like being able to be anyone.

Do anything.

* * *

What she does is learn all the things she has no one to teach to her.

She learns the names.

Nan, Cordelia, Queenie, Madison, Fiona, Myrtle, Misty. Those are the easy ones.

Vassago whose office is to speak the past and things to come, to see the hidden and the lost things. Sallos who thinks himself peaceful, bringing love that's gentle and kind.

Buer and Stolas, cures and curses and knowledge.

Leraje who is poison and pain.

Sitri the revealer of womanly secrets and shame.

Dangerous discord is brought by Andras.

Naberius of gracious living

Buné's can turn the dead into demons, the resurgence of tainted life.

And her?

The one she answers to answers to another. One's just the harvester of neutral intentions, the blind eye that doesn't care about someone else's pain and doesn't care about what you do or how you do it. It just likes to watch. In Solomon's lesser key they call it Sier.

Dantalion is the one who meets her halfway.

He can look like anyone. A simulacrum of voice and touch and skin.

That much alone makes her wary, keeps her from calling.

* * *

Madison calls what they did 'her boy' or 'rocky horror' and of course the distasteful 'frankendick' which while inaccurate still hits a nerve.

They keep him somewhere safe but it's hard to get away from the school, Cordelia is too wrapped up in her own weighty bag of bullshit to pay much mind but eventually her absence at the dinner table might be noticed.

It's only once.

And while she wasn't confident in the potential for him not to die this time she is confident that she can bring him back, again. Alone, this time.

Better than before.

If something should go wrong.

It does.

And _when_ it does she realizes she'd been hoping for it all along.

Everyone needs a pet.

But he can be so surly sometimes. Angry. Misplaced for sure, but still she's the only one around to get angry at, he can't leave, he's not well-formed enough and he can't speak.

Walking is replaced by a shuffling parkinsonian gait like someone who's taken years of antipsychotics at too high a dosage and speech is substituted with grunting assent to anything she says.

His legs and feet, his arms, his hands. The only things that are his still, his face, his trunk, his dick. Not that it matters, not that either of them has much use for it. It's just the necessary equipment used to differentiate him as a man instead of a Halloween themed Ken doll.

She makes sure to acclimate him to his new limbs, articles of range of motion and physical therapy resourced from the internet late at night when everyone has gone to bed and the printer hissing out pages won't go noticed.

He's so angry, a little disobedient on the best days and completely uncooperative on all the others when she checks his stitches, stretches his limbs, checks every inch of skin to make sure nothing's mottling and horribly rotten since her last visitation to the place she wants to believe is safe where she's sequestered him.

She doesn't think he can get hard.

It's not a problem with circulation, Madison's O negative, they made sure to transfuse him once they realized that his ashen color and lethargy might not only be from coming around to the world of the living.

It's a problem with her.

He hates her, most days. Some days he cries angrily because he really doesn't _hate_ her. No one wants to be dead, but no one wants live like he has to.

Some part of her wants to hurt him for it, tell him he should be grateful that she liked him enough to feel bad about him dying. It seems impossible and dumb, an instant connection to a boy who doesn't know her or what she can do, there's something bad in her that wants to clue him in.

She wants a whipping boy to take out all the unfairness of her life, her new home, her body out on.

He parents abandoning her, the chances they and every other related adult had to tell her what might happen, to keep a close watch on her and the boyfriend they knew she had. Cordelia who has taught her nothing, Fiona who has taught her only what is mutualy beneficial to her own schemes. The mishmash of friendly and haughty voices around her at the breakfast counter or the dinner table. The way Myrtle came and dragged her out a life that was bearable even if it included a funeral of a boy she loved and a dim future outlook.

She has no footing here, in her new life.

They took her away and gave her no new purpose in return, they expected her to figure it out on her own and now they all want her to abandon what she's found, what she's building for herself in the fenced-in new reality of the world she's a part of, apart from.

When it does happen and he dies, again. No hope of a revival when his brain is a mess of red Jell-O dripping out his ears, they bury him.

Cordelia and Fiona, while she stays locked in her room.

Surprising.

But Zoe goes back.

She's been reading. Enchanted locks on her bedroom door are easy to unspell and put back into place when she finds her way back to bed at dawn.

There are other ways, and he hasn't been dead long.

* * *

It's not just the obvious texts and tomes she's read, Goetia and The Lesser Key of Solomon, excerpts of the real Necronomicon.

She combs over copies of Pythagoras' burned scrolls, the Picatrix, Paracelsus' treaties on good and bad magic, Johann Weyer's collected writing collections, rare pages purchased from Johann Scheible's forgotten bookstore, The Black Pullet, Alibeck the Egyptian's Verum, And a strange small book, a pamphlet of selected dark topics by someone called Turiel the Watcher.

* * *

She tells him about Charlie, tells him what she can do, and that she's sorry.

It turns out that when he does finally talk it _is_ 'kill me' that comes out of his mouth, but when he says it she knows 'kill me'_ isn't_ how she's supposed to take the words.

The way she's supposed to take it, as he leans in close, looms like a sewed together monster she's made him and says it, is badly. It's meant to hurt her, cut her bones. It just makes her angry, who is he to use the things she's told him to hurt her? She thinks that he wants to see her cry. It just makes her kiss him.

He wanted her to fuck him, after all. A kiss just preludes all of that.

He wheels back like a forsaken grocery cart in high wind.

She laughs, low and genuine.

"You're dead, anyway."

Each word carefully enunciated as and for the essential payback in response to his attempt to hurt her in what he thinks is the most horrible way, reminding her that she's poison. He fails at what he's set out to do because above that is the very real fact about him being in front of her with all his spite and resentment and that she brought him back.

She's all he has.

She's the closest thing to a fucking god that he'll ever know while he's alive.

He can't go back, his next of kin already got a copy of his death certificate for their files, an empty coffin has already been buried, his friends are dead, his life is done and not enough time has gone by that either of them know what the one he might have will look like.

After that, he's nicer.

Less belligerent.

Unspoken understanding. She's all he has. Out of all the things she feels, she feels bad for him. And maybe it's a revelation, that a girl like her who can do strange, awful things and maybe more, has stuck around instead of incinerating the mistake he thinks he is.

It strokes her insides with something like arousal, which is a rare coming, near nonexistent, when he starts trusting her it's warm recognition lightening up her limbs. Ego fed and feeling like he's her pet.

A creature that looks like a boy.

And, god, he fucks like a monster.

Beastly and supplicant at the same time.

She'd mismeasured her control.

He's pounding inside of her, and she slips her tongue on top of his, hot and slick and the best thing she's ever felt and something inside of her says 'yes' to a question she didn't hear with Charlie and already answered with Madison's fraternity rapist before she climbed on top of his hospital bed.

_Yes._

And he starts to bleed, all over her face, all over his, dripping down his throat from his ears.

She gets to lick his skin and then look at the red on hers in the mirror, she's a mess but it's good to see. She sits next to his body and waits, because she knows. Somehow, some fucking way, she _knows_.

There's no fucking way she _should _know. But she does and when Fiona comes in to survey the damage with Nan at her side, she's already dressed and cleaned up the blood on her face, there's a negligible amount in her hair.

And Fiona looks at her with something she knows is awe mixed with envy, and hate. So much hate. There's pride too.

They say there's pride, that there's supposed to be, and that it necessitates the fall to come.

She's rising and Fiona may as well be buried.

Cordelia goes out as she comes in with Nan and goes with Fiona and her dead monster.

But…it's doesn't matter.

Nan looks at her, sad and sorry, maybe. There's understanding about something between them.

* * *

Zoe knows where they buried him.

It's funny that from all the things she's read, it's the Decameron she gets the idea from.

**Who is that wicked man**

**who stole my pot of herbs,**

**Etc.**

_He appeared to her in a dream, all pale and ghastly, with his clothes rent in pieces, and she thought that he spoke to her thus: " My dearest Isabel, thou grievest incessantly for my absence, and art continually calling upon me; but know that I can return no more to thee, for the last day that thou sawest me, thy brothers put me to death." And, describing the place where they had buried him, he bade her call no more upon him, nor ever expect to see him again; and disappeared. _

_Isabella woke up, implicitly believing the vision, and wept bitterly. In the morning, not daring to say anything to her brothers, she resolved to go to the place mentioned in the dream, to be convinced of the reality. Accordingly, having leave to go a little way into the country, along with a companion of hers, who was acquainted with all her affairs, she went thither, and clearing the ground of the dried leaves, with which it was covered, she observed where the earth seemed to be lightest, and dug there. She had not searched far before she came to her lover's body, which she found in no degree wasted ; this informed her of the truth of her vision, and she was in the utmost concern on that account ; but, as that was not a fit place for lamentation, she would willingly have taken the corpse away with her, to give it a more decent interment; but, finding herself unable to do that, she cut off the head, which she put into a handkerchief, and, covering the trunk again with mound, she gave the head to her maid to carry, and returned home without being perceived. She then shut herself up in her chamber, and lamented over her lover's head till she had washed it with her tears, and then she put it into a flower-pot, having folded it in a fine napkin, and covering it with earth, she planted sweet herbs therein, which she watered with nothing but rose or orange water, or else with her tears, accustoming herself to sit always before it, and devoting her whole heart unto it, as containing her dear Lorenzo. _

_The sweet herbs, what with her continual bathing, and the moisture arising from the putrefied head, flourished exceedingly, and sent forth a most agreeable odor. Continuing this manner of life, she was observed by some of the neighbors, and they related her conduct to her brothers, who had before remarked with surprise the decay of her beauty. Accordingly, they both reprimanded her for it, and, finding that ineffectual, stole the pot from her. She, perceiving that it was taken away, begged earnestly of them to restore it, which they refusing, she fell sick. The young men wondered much why she should have so great a fancy for it, and were resolved to see what it contained: turning out the earth, therefore, they saw the napkin, and in it the head, not so much consumed, but that, by the curled locks, they knew it to be Lorenzo's, which threw them into the utmost astonishment, and fearing lest it should be known, they buried it privately, and withdrew themselves thence to Naples. The young lady never ceased weeping, and calling for her pot of flowers, till she died: and thus terminated her unfortunate love. But, in some time afterwards, the thing became public._

And that's the story.

That's the idea.

Except she's got no evil brothers to kill her lover and she's not going to cry the days away by the potted hyacinth under the window. No one's going to steal it either and leave it buried.

She's certainly not going to die anytime soon, or in any foreseeable future.

* * *

Late at night, he comes to make her come.

His ghost.

A private haunting that leave her writhing in her balmy sheets.

She keeps the part of him that charmed her the most, smile, eyes, dimples, curls, witty frat boy brain that was smarter than he looked.

She keeps it because she knows when she decides to go for what she really wants it will come at a price, her new favorite for an old one just to become one.

She waters the plant twice a day and gives it plenty of light.

* * *

In chalk, under her bed, she draws its sigil.

She wakes up with it in her bed, sharing her pillow.

It's warm like a man, but what it looks like is anything she'd like if her back wasn't turned.

She knows its name, tells him there's a well-nurtured gift for it, under her window.

* * *

It speaks in sibilant syllables and kisses the back of her neck before leaving. In the morning her horticultural endeavor is gone. Despite that, the room still smells like hyacinth.

And life changes from that point on.

It's sweeter and softer and filled with much nicer things, things she likes, things she can control.

It asks her what she wants. It's hard to say. There's a lot. But she knows what it's really asking. It just wants to know who she's in the mood to fuck.

That's the offering it wants, a libation of heat and lust from what's between her thighs.

* * *

_Charlie_

The first boy inside, the sacrificial lamb. Something like his soul sloshing around inside of her. Convulsing while his cum rolls down her thighs after his dick's gone limp and slipped out. She'd had to explain to her mother and her father and there's disappointment with knowing that their daughter isn't a virgin anymore before the concern over how she's processing the dead boy in her bed wafts in like smoke over their shamed faces.

**_Charlie_**

In her small, thinned walled, dormitory room holding her legs open on his elbows, standing at the edge of the mattress and looking down at her, grinning youth with fallen nympth.

_The boy she killed_

Red on the white sterility of sheets somebody has died on, seething anger and the pleasure of retribution. Almost coming to the whining pitch of death on the monitor.

**_The boy she killed_**

In Madison's unused bed he's not comatose, he's nude and lifting her from where she's sitting on his ridged abdomen to the plumpness of the mouth that laughed once at how easy and fun it was to hurt something weak and pretty. She rips them off his face with her teeth once they've served the purpose of kissing her cunt.

_Madison_

Crying and raging at her for using all the hot water she's wanted so she can burn the memory of sticky fingers off her prized Prima donna skin. And her telling Madison the bathtub is big enough for the both of them, them taking turns with the submerged showerhead set to full spray.

**_Madison_**

After they've watched her burn. Fiona is supreme then. Seeing Madison's ash stained ghost comes standard with a power Fiona doesn't have in her arsenal but Zoe's fully equipped with now. Not the power of communication or communion with the dead but communion with something a bit more substantial scary. Fully realized now, in the horrific way she wants Madison to come back to her as, it lets her smell the salt-sweetness of burning flesh, crisp and tummy rumbling. The fingers don't burn her skin but they stir up their own heat once their inside in a way that has nothing to do with Zoe's love of monsters.

_Kyle_

The only thing he really owns pounding away inside of her, hard, grisly. Brutal because they've made him that way, leading arms and rapine hands and cowards legs. Snips. Snails. Puppydogs' tails. Her tongue rubbing his stitching, the mouth they brought him back to life with taking it back. Because she can. Because it makes this better.

_**Kyle** _

Catching her unaware around the back of the school while the girls drink tea, Fiona does another line, and Delphine chafes her lips against a rough-hewn gag somewhere in the attic. Grass stains on the sole of one white sock as it slides on the tailored lawn, the other chafing the half of his firm collegiate smarty-pants ass his slipped down pants provide. His accent rough and raw quoting _ars amatoria_ while he fucks her.

_Her master_

Pours over her like ink. The longest hair she's seen on a man, it smells nicer than hers, skin that's a cool balm to the nighttime stickiness that saturates her small dorm.

Shadow body that's firm and smoothed over like ocean glass, she'd expected volcanic rock. When he rocks into her it's syrup and velvet, devoid of the jagged stabs she was certain of.

In the candle aura they crowd around the bed. Ghosts that are ghosts, ghosts she can see, ghosts that are real and at rapt attention.

A gift from her devil man.

Gift?

No, but he makes it feel like it. What's a week asleep to her? Nothing. Not when her dreams look like this. Asleep to the girls and a confused mother-daughter witch duo, awake and writhing on the sheets somewhere in a place they can't come into.

It's drawn in chalk under her bed. A name and a number to call on Hell's hotline.

Charlie's there because she knows it made something angry that her boyfriend fucked her before she figured out who she belonged too, the boy is there for what's he's done, Madison because she was always a touch too full of sin, Kyle because they brought him back to life and that's not ever allowed.

When she goes down it will be like dead Cleopatra marched on a golden throne through Rome, followers tugged behind on golden chains, forever in service of the thing rotting in the balmy heat that they used to call a Queen.

* * *

**A/N:** Kinda creepy I hope. In case you didn't catch it the smutlets bits are the real actual person first and then the second is Zoe having sex with the demon, Dantalion (who can look like anyone you want it to) mentioned previously in the story. I like my horror and my angst.


End file.
